– Swirl around in the Pacific Gyre.– Sink from a melting glacier and then swim like a polar bear. – Float inside “The Bayble”—a giant bubble made of bay twigs and shrink wrap.– Blow on the Diatom Mobile to make air currents and see the brownian motion of magnified unicellular creatures– Feel the tepid surge of extreme storm patterns.– Swim with Lisa Agliano and her couture plastics fashion in The Human Mobile sculpture by Carry Garcia.

I facilitate Wide Blue Yonder Dance company, a loose collective of local Santa Cruz dancers and aerialists who collaborate to create art, performances and and dances since 2007. When I’m not woking as a physical therapist I love to fill my time with my husband, Steve, my dogs, and chasing after my 96-year old mother and being upside down, doing aerial dance of one form an another. My first aerial training started with Spanish Web at Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1973 and has continued until today. In 2010, I co-founded Santa Cruz Aerial Playground. Recently, I have a blast teaching bungee dancing, aerial fabric and creating sculptures with which aerialists and viewers can interact at The 418 Project.

Plastic Water all started with the making of “The Pacific Gyre” sculpture on election night 2016. I couldn’t sleep, worried about the potential of new national policies, which ignore and deny scientific and economic research that could erode progress towards protecting our environment, social justice and peace. I started stringing plastic water bottles together wishing I could make a safe water pipeline for the folks in Flint, MI. I realized the absurdity and injustice of fulfilling the right of safe water to everyone by the use of expensive bottled water. Here on the west coast, we consume mass amounts of water bottles when we don’t need to. This lazy luxury for us, but necessity for Flint, contributes to plastic pollution in our water ways and oceans.

The winter storms of early 2017 in California inspired “Earth’s Menopausal Climacteric,” “Marionette Kelp Forest,” “Melting Glacier,” and “Bayble” sculptures. What we experienced here in California was mild compared to the hurricane season of 2017 in the Atlantic and elsewhere in the world. Indeed, research by Sarah-Jeanne Royer measured the contribution of plastics in the environment to the production of methane gas, a cause of global warming.

“Earth’s Menopausal Climacteric” is a view of storm systems and Ozone holes. The “Marionette Kelp Forest” is made of plastic bags and fishing line with which one can pull strings and become entangled. “The Melting Glacier” made of plastic pipe and bottles inundates, just like a baby polar bear might be entangled by such a contraption. “Bayble” is a six foot diameter bubble made of bay laurel twigs and pallet wrap. It acknowledges desolated forests from climate change and the interaction of plastic waste with what naturally belongs in the oceans.

I am grateful to Lisa Agliano, who is sharing her sculpture of plastic fish with bellies full of plastic garbage, and Carry Eheler, who contributes a web of woven plastic swirling in the “Human Mobile.”